This weekend, ITV's much-trumpeted new gameshow Red or Black? arrived on screen. To the earth-shaking bongs of Inception, Ant and Dec strode on to an aircraft hanger-sized set and unveiled the show's centrepiece. From the medieval fanfare, you'd have thought a crack in the universe had been revealed and the devil himself was about to emerge from it – instead the studio floor split in half and unveiled a roulette wheel.

A very large, beautifully lit roulette wheel admittedly, but not the portal to another dimension some viewers may have anticipated. Eventually someone would win or lose a million pounds based on the spin of that wheel – but first there was much to endure.

Red or Black? is essentially You Bet meets Deal or No Deal on a grand scale. With a budget of £15m, it is said to be the costliest gameshow of all time: bigger, more expensive and easier to grasp than The Million Pound Drop and The Cube. A thousand hopefuls gathered at "The Red or Black Arena" (also known as Wembley Arena) to gamble on the outcome of a stunt – on Saturday it was two motorcyclists jumping through an ever-decreasing gap. The winners then progressed to the next round, which somewhat less impressively involved opening an envelope and either cheering or crying, before the lucky few were then coached off to Battersea power station to watch David Hasselhoff "reverse bungee" jump.

At some point a Simon Cowell-endorsed pop act entered the mix – on Saturday Leona Lewis performed her current single before selecting a suitcase with either red or black lining.

Exciting stuff, except that it was dull beyond belief, despite Ant and Dec's best efforts to ramp up the tension. (It appears I was not alone in feeling this way – the show lost a million viewers on Sunday night.) Red or Black? uses many of the same tactics as The X Factor to spoon feed emotion to the audience (sob story soundbites, mobile phone conversations – "I'm through to the next round" is the TV equivalent of "I'm on the bus" – excessive use of Coldplay's Fix You), but doesn't give the audience a talented performer or interesting character to root for. They are merely a bunch of people who have entered a gameshow. There's not even any shouting the right answer at the screen furiously – because there isn't one.

The trend for big-budget, high-stakes and high-drama TV gameshows seems reminiscent of the escalating scale of Las Vegas mega hotels – each one more extravagant and ridiculous than the last. It's now hard to imagine any primetime TV show that doesn't involve some vast set, rockshow lighting, Chris Tarrant-style pregnant pauses and a life-changing amount of cash as the prize. Where will it end? Is there no future for less bombastic gameshows?

"Does it seem real yet?" asked Ant as ribbons and glitter exploded after Kevin had correctly picked red and found himself a millionaire.

"No," said Kevin, dumbfounded by luck. Somehow Red or Black? didn't quite seem real for me either. But what did you think? Does bigger necessarily mean better when it comes to gameshows?